A new survey of psychiatrists in the United States and India has shown differences in how each group weighs symptoms in the diagnosis of common psychiatric disorders, including depression and mania.

The survey showed, for example, that Indian psychiatrists rated somatic symptoms such as pain or fatigue higher in the diagnosis of depression than their American counterparts. Conversely, Indian psychiatrists ranked anger or violent behavior above more subtle symptoms in the diagnosis of acute mania.

The findings underline the fact that cultural differences can affect diagnosis and have implications for studies of global mental health, said lead author Jhilam Biswas, MD, a fellow at the Law and Psychiatry Program of the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

“The impact of this is in global mental health today; there are a lot of parts of the world where there are no psychiatrists,” Dr Biswas told a press conference here. “We need to teach community health workers to learn how to triage mental illness, and understanding cultural context is a very important way to teach global mental health.”

She pointed out that at least in the United States, there are more international psychiatrists than there are American graduates, “and so picking up cultural biases that might come into play in the diagnostic practices of international psychiatrists in the US or Canada, this research might help to elicit that. As well, in residency training, this is a great way to build up cultural competence.”

“I think that data like these make psychiatrists more sensitive to the cultural context of mental illness,” Dr Biswas told Medscape Medical News. “It’s much more than cultural nuances of diagnosis that these data capture, so that we can be more culturally sensitive when we’re in different parts of the world, and have our skills be more universal.”

She presented the new findings here at the American Psychiatric Association (APA) 2015 Annual Meeting.

Frequent Debate

A frequent debate in psychiatry involves the extent to which major psychiatric diagnoses are universal across cultures, the authors write.

In this study, the researchers set out to capture differences in diagnostic practices between “two very different parts of the world,” Dr Biswas said, Boston, Massachusetts, and Bangalore, India. “Psychiatrists see a huge volume of patients,” she said, and “their ability to look at someone and determine diagnoses is a window into how culture affects the presentation of mental illness in a certain country.”

Further, understanding how psychiatrists in different parts of the world diagnose mental illness “is a way for all of us to be better international psychiatrists,” she added. “Particularly the field of global mental health is certainly advancing and becoming a large part of the psychiatry training programs today, and a big problem in psychiatry is psychiatrists don’t often feel comfortable in different cultural contexts, so this might be an evidence-based way of looking at how different psychiatrists diagnose mental illness.”

For this study, the researchers surveyed 47 American psychiatrists from three academic centers in Boston and 52 psychiatrists from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience in Bangalore, India, the largest academic center of psychiatrists and neurologists in India.

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Participants ranked symptoms of depression, mania, and psychosis from lists of symptoms taken from the DSM-5 or ICD-10 that both groups were familiar with. They were asked to rank from 1 to 10 symptoms most and least commonly seen among their patients with depression, acute mania, and psychosis in schizophrenia. The participants’ responses were then compared.

“What we found was, in general, the top four symptoms for both groups of psychiatrists were similar,” Dr Biswas noted, “but what we also found was significant differences in certain types of symptoms.”

In depression, for example, US psychiatrists ranked psychological factors such as pessimism and obsessive thoughts higher, whereas Indian psychiatrists ranked somatic complaints higher. Specific somatic pain was particularly divergent between the groups, she said. “The P-value for somatic pain was 0.000000, which means it was actually quite significant.”

For acute mania, again the symptoms were similar overall, with symptoms such as grandiosity and decreased need for sleep reported to be common by both groups, and hypersexuality to be least common. “However, in India, what was particularly significant was activation energy - anger, agitation, violent behavior - Indian psychiatrists saw that and thought mania, while American psychiatrists didn’t,” Dr Biswas said. Instead, pressured speech and distractibility were some of the most common symptoms they saw.

  (Indian Psychiatrists)

Finally, for psychosis in schizophrenia, both groups ranked in slightly different order the same top four symptoms as well as the least common symptoms, visual hallucinations and peculiar movement disorders. However, Indian psychiatrists found delusions to be much more common, whereas American psychiatrists ranked paranoia higher, she noted.